"Which option describes how often you use Dhall"

"Never used it" - 7 (38.9%)

"Briefly tried it out" - 7 (38.9%)

"Use it for my personal projects" - 1 (5.6%)

"Use it at work" - 3 (16.7%)

The survey size was small and the selection process is biased towards people who follow me on Twitter or read my blog and are interested enough in Dhall to answer the survey. So I don't read too much into the percentages but I am interested in the absolute count of people who benefit from using Dhall (i.e. the last two categories).

That said, I was pretty happy that four people who took the survey benefit from the use of Dhall. These users provided great insight into how Dhall currently provides value in the wild.

I was also surprised by how many people took the survey that had never used Dhall. These people still gave valuable feedback on their first impressions of the language and use cases that still need to be addressed.

"Would anything encourage you to use Dhall more often?"

This was a freeform question designed to guide future improvements and to assess if there were technical issues holding people back from adopting the language.

Since there were only 18 responses, I can directly respond to most of them:

Mainly, a formal spec (also an ATS parsing implementation)

Backends for more languages would be great.

More compilation outputs, e.g. Java

The main thing is more time on my part (adoption as JSON-preprocessor and via Haskell high on my TODO), but now that you ask, a Python binding

Stable spec, ...

Julia bindings

Scala integration, ...

I totally agree with this feedback! Standardizing the language and providing more backends are the highest priorities for this year.

No language was mentioned more than once, but I will most likely target Java and Scala first for new backends.

Some way to find functions would be immensely helpful. The way to currently find functions is by word of mouth.

This is a great idea, so I created an issue on the issue tracker to record this suggestion:

I assume the feedback on "ability to describe the whole config in one file" is referring a common work-around of importing repeated types from another file. The new type synonym support means you should now be able to describe the whole config in one file without any issues.

Verbosity for writing values in sum types was a no-go for our use case

...; more concise sum types.

The most recent release added support for the constructors keyword to simplify sum types. Here is an example of this new keyword in action:

Dhall does provide a Haskell API including support for structured error messages. These store source spans which can be used for highlighting errors, so this should be straightforward to implement. These source spans power Dhall's error messages, such as:

... the source span is how Dhall knows to highlight the Natural/even x subexpression at the bottom of the error message and that information can be programmatically retrieved from the Haskell API.

Sometimes have to work around record or Turing completeness limitations to generate desired json or yaml: often need record keys that are referenced from elsewhere as strings.

I will probably never allow Dhall to be Turing complete. Similarly, I will probably never permit treating text as anything other than an opaque value.

Usually the solution here is to upstream the fix (i.e. don't rely on weakly typed inputs). For example, instead of retrieving the field's name as text, retrieve a Dhall function to access the desired field, since functions are first-class values in Dhall.

If you have questions about how to integrate Dhall into your workflow, the current best place to ask is the issue tracker for the language. I'm not sure if this is the best place to host such questions and I'm open to suggestions for other forums for support.

Would like to be able to compute the sha1 or similar of a file or expression.

The Dhall package does provide a dhall-hash utility exactly for this purpose, which computes the semantic hash of any file or expression. For example:

I worry that contributors/friends who'd like to work on a project with me would be intimidated because they don't know the lambda calculus

Dhall will always support anonymous functions, so I doubt the language will be able to serve those who shy away from lambda calculus. This is probably where something like JSON would be a more appropriate choice.

..., type inference

..., full type inference, row polymorphism for records

This is probably referring to Haskell/PureScript/Elm-style inference where the types of anonymous functions can be inferred (i.e. using unification). I won't rule out supporting type inference in the future but I doubt it will happen this year. However, I welcome any formal proposal to add type inference to the language now that the type-checking semantics have been standardized.

It's cool, but I'm yet to be convinced it will make my life easier

No problem! Dhall does not have a mission to "take over the world" or displace other configuration file formats.

Dhall's only mission is to serve people who want programmable configuration files without sacrificing safety or ease of maintenance.

"What do you use Dhall for?"

"Why do you use Dhall?"

This was the part of the survey that I look forward to the most: seeing how people benefit from Dhall. These were two freeform questions that I'm combining in one section:

WHY:Dhall as a template language allows us to express all of the inputs to a template in one place. We don't have to hunt-and-peck to find out what a template is parameterized by. And if we want to understand what some variable is in the template, we can just look at the top of the file where its type is declared. We want exact dependencies for our elm code. There is no specific syntax for exact versions in elm-package.json. There is a hack around that limitation which requires enforcement by convention (or CI scripts or some such). We use Dhall to generate exact versions by construction. The JSON that's generated uses the hack around the limitation, but we don't have to think about that accidental complexity.

WHAT:Ad hoc command-line tools

WHAT:Generating docker swarm and other configs from common templates with specific variables inserted safely.

WHY:JSON and yaml suck, want to know about errors at compile time.

WHAT:Kubernetes

WHY:Schema validation. Kubernetes is known for blowing up in your face at runtime by doing evaluation and parsing at the same time

WHAT:Config

WHY:Strong typing & schema

WHY:Rich functinality and concise syntax

WHAT:JSON preprocessor

WHY:JSON is universal but a bit dumb

WHAT:configuration - use haskell integration and spit out json/yaml on some projects (to kubernetes configs for instance)

WHY:I love pure fp and dealing with configs wastes a lot of my time and is often error prone

Interestingly, ops-related applications like Docker Swarm and Kubernetes were mentioned in three separate responses. I've also received feedback (outside the survey) from people interested in using Dhall to generate Terraform and Cloudformation templates, too.

This makes sense because configuration files for operational management tend to be large and repetitive, which benefits from Dhall's support for functions and let expressions to reduce repetition.

Also, reliability matters for operations engineer, so being able to validate the correctness of a configuration file ahead of time using a strong type system can help reduce outages. As Dan Luu notes:

Configuration bugs, not code bugs, are the most common cause I’ve seen of really bad outages. When I looked at publicly available postmortems, searching for “global outage postmortem” returned about 50% outages caused by configuration changes. Publicly available postmortems aren’t a representative sample of all outages, but a random sampling of postmortem databases also reveals that config changes are responsible for a disproportionate fraction of extremely bad outages. As with error handling, I’m often told that it’s obvious that config changes are scary, but it’s not so obvious that most companies test and stage config changes like they do code changes.

Also, type-checking a Dhall configuration file is a faster and more convenient to valid correctness ahead-of-time than an integration test.

Functions and types were the same two justifications for my company (Awake Security) using Dhall internally. We had large and repetitive configurations for managing a cluster of appliances that we wanted to simplify and validate ahead of time to reduce failures in the field.

Another thing that stood out was how many users rely on Dhall's JSON integration. I already suspected this but this survey solidified that.

I also learned that one user was using Dhall not just to reduce repetition, but to enforce internal policy (i.e. a version pinning convention for elm-package.json files). This was a use case I hadn't thought of marketing before.

Other feedback

We tried it as an option at work for defining some APIs but describing values in sum types was way too verbose (though I think I understand why it might be needed). We really like the promise of a strongly typed config language but it was pretty much unusable for us without building other tooling to potentially improve ergonomics.

As mentioned above, this is fixed in the latest release with the addition of the constructors keyword.

Last time I checked, I found syntax a bit awkward. Hey, Wadler's law :) Anyway, great job! I'm not using Dhall, but I try to follow its development, because it's different from everything else I've seen.

Syntax concerns strike again! This makes me suspect that this will be a recurring complaint (similar to Haskell and Rust).

I also appreciate that people are following the language and hopefully getting ideas for their own languages and tools. The one thing I'd really like more tools to steal is Dhall's import system.

You rock. Thanks for all your work for the community.

Dhall is awesome!

KOTGW

I love the project and am grateful for all the work that's been done to make it accessible and well documented. Keep up the good work!

Thank you all for the support, and don't forget to thank other people who have contributed to the project by reporting issues and implementing new features.

Standardization

Standardization is currently the highest priority for the language since Dhall cannot be feasibly be ported to other languages until the standard is complete. In the absence of the standard parallel implementations in other languages are chasing a moving and poorly-defined target.

Fortunately, standardization made good progress this year. The completed parts are:

The one missing piece is the standard semantics for import resolution. Once that is complete then alternative implementations should have a well-defined and reasonably stable foundation to build upon.

Standardizing the language should help stabilize the language and increase the barrier to making changes. The goal is that implementations of Dhall in other languages can review and approve/reject proposed changes to the standard. I've already adopted this approach myself by submitting pull requests to change the standard before changing the Haskell implementation. For example:

All of these integrations have one thing in common: they all build on top of the Haskell implementation of the Dhall configuration language. This is due to necessity: the Dhall language is still in the process of being standardized so depending on the Haskell API is the only realistic way to stay up to date with the language.

Dhall implementations in other languages are incomplete and abandoned, most likely due to the absence of a stable and well-defined specification to target:

The JSON integration has been the most successful integration by far. In fact, many users have been using the JSON integration as a backdoor to integrating Dhall into their favorite programming language until a language-native Dhall integration is available.

Some users have proposed that Dhall should emphasize the JSON integration and de-emphasize language-native Dhall bindings. In other words, they believe that Dhall should primarily market itself as an alternative to Jsonnet or HCL.

So far I've struck a middle ground, which is to market language-native bindings (currently only Haskell and Nix) when they exist and recommend going through JSON as a fallback. I don't want to lean for too long on the JSON integration because:

Going through JSON means certain Dhall features (like sum types and functions) are lost in translation.

I believe Dhall's future is healthier if the language integrates with a diverse range of configuration file formats and programming languages instead of relying on the JSON integration.

I want to avoid a "founder effect" problem in the Dhall community where JSON-specific concerns dwarf other concerns

I would like Dhall to eventually be a widely supported configuration format in its own right instead of just a preprocessor for JSON

New language features

Several new language features were introduced in 2017. All of these features were added based on user feedback:

This is useful if you want to import Text generated by other programs (for example: an SSH public key file) without having to preprocess the input to be a valid Dhall string literal (including string escaping)

Don't expect as many new language features in 2018. Some evolution is natural in the first year based on user feedback, but I will start rejecting more feature requests unless they have a very high power-to-weight ratio. My goal for 2018 is to slow down language evolution to give alternative implementations a stable target to aim for.

The one likely exception to this rule in 2018 is a widespread user request for "type synonym" support. However, I will probably won't get around to fixing this until after the first complete draft of the language standard.

Computes the semantic hash of any Dhall expression (typically an import)

Tooling is one of the easier things to build for Dhall since command-line tools can easily depend on the Haskell API, which is maintained, well-documented, and up-to-date with the language.

However, excessive dependence on tooling can sometimes indicate a flaw in the language. For example, the recent constructors keyword proposal originated as something that several people were originally implementing using their own tooling and was elevated to a language feature.

Haskell-specific improvements

Dhall also provides a Haskell API that you can build upon, which also landed some notable improvements:

The language core is simple enough that some people have begun using Dhall as a starting point for their implementing their own programming languages. I personally don't have any plans to market or use Dhall for this purpose but I still attempt to support this use case as long as these requests:

don't require changes to language standard

don't significantly complicate the implementation.

don't deteriorate performance

Documentation

The language's official documentation over the last year has been the Haskell tutorial, but I've been slowly working on porting the tutorial to language-agnostic documentation on a GitHub wiki:

I've been slowly whittling away at type-checking bugs both based on user reports and also from reasoning about the type-checking semantics as part of the standardization process.

The next step is to use proof assistants to verify the safety of the type-checking semantics but I doubt I will do that in 2018. The current level of assurance is probably good enough for most Dhall users for now. However, anybody interested in doing formal verification can take a stab at it now that the type-checking and normalization semantics have been formalized.

I also plan to turn the test suite into a standard conformance test that other implementations can use to verify that they implemented the standard correctly.

Infrastructure

This section covers all the miscellaneous improvements to supporting infrastructure:

Acknowledgments

... and also everybody who filed issues, reported bugs, requested features, and submitted pull requests! These all help improve the language and no contribution is too small.

Conclusion

In 2017 the focus was on responding to user feedback as people started to use Dhall "in anger". In 2018 the initial plan is to focus on standardization, language stabilization, and creating at least one complete alternative implementation native to another programming language.

Also, don't forget to take the language survey if you have time. I will review the feedback from the survey in a separate follow-up post and update the plan for 2018 accordingly.